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If one of your loved ones is physically wounded and possibly on the brink of death, and the people responsible for the horrible deed are next door, are you going to make every effort to save your loved one, or are you going to go on a vengeful rampage against those people next door? The answer is logically the former, though it's not the case for the characters in The Last House on the Left. It's up to you whether you want to accept that morally dubious contrivance or not.
The movie is divided into three parts, the first of which depicts the rape and apparent murder of Mari (Sara Paxton) by the film's villains. The second segment, which is definitely the strongest one of the movie, features those villains by chance taking refuge in the house of Mari's parents (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter), who initially have no idea of what's happened to their daughter. During the third and last segment, a moribund Mari returns home, and as soon as her parents discover what happened to her and find out that their guests are the ones responsible for it, they go to incredible lengths to exact revenge on the villains.
The worst decision made by the filmmakers is to have that third and final segment be the longest one of the three, as the segment is drenched in all the flaws that afflict most modern horror movies: dumb characters, poorly-realized chase sequences and an amount of blood that leaps and bounds exceeds the amount of scares. I would've liked it if the film's second segment had taken up the most screen time: the irony and the sense of awkwardness as Mari's parents take in their daughter's attackers as guests is palpable, and there's a solid amount of suspense in every moment that we think someone may discover what's going on. Sadly, these scenes occupy a very small amount of the film's running time.
One of the interesting things to note here is that the rape scene, which takes place during the movie's earlier moments, is being described by some as extremely disturbing. Obviously, this is a matter of opinion, and this may be a result of me being somewhat desensitized since I've seen so much worse in other movies, but I'd just like to say that if you think the rape scene in The Last House on the Left is disturbing, God help you if you should ever watch either Gaspar Noe's Irreversible or Tim Roth's The War Zone.
There's no avoiding the fact that as much as The Last House on the Left features a decent amount of suspense during its first segment (and the scene with Mari swimming while being shot at is expertly handled) and a glimmer of brilliance in the middle segment when the parents unwittingly take their daughter's attackers into their home, the film's awfully long climactic segment is worse than mediocre. A feeling of "please let it end already" is not unwarranted. It's quite clear that what the filmmakers were going for here was to elicit cheers from the audience every time that Mari's parents successfully killed off one of the evildoers, and I think that that could have been the case if the revenge-filled scenes were actually tense and showed some sense of creativity in terms of the deaths that take place, but that's not the case at all. Instead, we just get a terribly protacted set of cat-and-mouse sequences that unfold as predictably as possible.
As if these last scenes hadn't already covered every possible horror film cliche, the final moments of the film give us shots of all the dead bodies of those who've been slain during the movie. Every time this happens in a film, I can't help feeling like they're trying too hard, as if they want to remind people of all the awesome gore they saw, in case they forgot: "Oh yeah, wow, all those people got killed! This movie was so cool!" I suppose that must really be the reaction that a lot of audience members have when watching stuff like The Last House on the Left, seeing as films like these keep getting made.
4/10
